The title is irresistible. Seriously — who wouldn’t want to delve the mysteries of love and sex? From prehistoric cave drawings to Shakespeare’s sonnets to “Fifty Shades of Grey,” people have been trying to understand the most primal of emotional and physical urges. Other than how we all got here in the first place, love and sex remain the biggest mysteries in the universe.
Playwright Bathsheba Doran enters the fray with “The Mystery of Love and Sex,” opening in previews April 5 at Glencoe’s Writers Theatre.
Directed by Marti Lyons, the drama centers on two couples. Charlotte (Hayley Burgess) and Jonny (Travis Turner) are 20-somethings whose lifelong friendship has recently veered into something different. Charlotte’s parents Lucinda (Lia Mortensen) and Howard (Keith Kupferer) are enmeshed in their own tangled relationship. Over the course of several years and one momentous dinner party, both couples find the secrets of their love- and sex-lives laid bare.
Lyons says she “fell head over heels in love” with the play the first time she read it. “It’s very honest. It’s deep, but it’s got a lightness and a humor. (Doran) is brilliant at understanding and writing about the puzzle of the human heart,” she says.
“One of the things I truly loved about this play is how it depicts the human search for connection, and the need all of us have to be seen, seen as we truly are. That kind of authenticity is a prerequisite for any true connection and honest relationship,” Lyons says.
In some respects, Lyons say, “The Mystery of Love and Sex” is structured like a detective novel, but with love rather than murder at the apex of the revelatory denouement. As in classic whodunnits, she notes, audience perspective “continually shifts” as information is revealed in “The Mystery of Love and Sex.”
“In detective mysteries, you’re given a little more information with each scene. (Doran) does the same thing. From the title on, the mystery resonates on several levels,” Lyons says.
The evocation of Adam and Eve in the play’s publicity stills featuring Travis and Burgess is no accident, Lyons adds. The first couple of the Bible were intentionally echoed in the promotional shots, Lyons says.
But while things did not end in paradise for Adam and Eve, “The Mystery of Love and Sex” shows offers a less dire take on long-term relationships, Lyons says.
“At the center of the story is this remarkable and incredibly deep friendship,” she says. “There’s a bit of hope in that I think.”
‘The Mystery of Love and Sex’
When: April 5–July 2
Where: Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe
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Tickets: $35-$80
Contact: 847-242-6000; www.writerstheatre.org